Libertarianism in the United States is a movement promoting individual liberty and minimized government. Although the word "libertarian" continues to be widely used to refer to anti-state socialists internationally, its meaning in the United States has deviated from its political origins. The Libertarian Party asserts the following to be core beliefs of libertarianism:
Libertarians support maximum liberty in both personal and economic matters. They advocate a much smaller government; one that is limited to protecting individuals from coercion and violence. Libertarians tend to embrace individual responsibility, oppose government bureaucracy and taxes, promote private charity, tolerate diverse lifestyles, support the free market, and defend civil liberties.Through 20 polls on this topic spanning 13 years, Gallup found that voters who are libertarian on the political spectrum ranged from 17–23% of the American electorate. This includes members of the Libertarian Party, Republican Party and Democratic Party as well as independents.
History
The Gadsden flag is a symbol of libertarianism in the United States
Logotype of Alliance of the Libertarian Left
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A Libertarian Party revision of the Gadsen flag
In the 19th century, key libertarian thinkers, individualist anarchists and minarchists, were based in the United States, most notably Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker. These political thinkers argued that government should be kept to a minimum and that it is only legitimate to the extent that people voluntarily support it as in Spooner's No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority. American writers Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson advocated for individualism and even anarchism throughout that century, leaving a significant imprint on libertarianism worldwide.
Moving into the 20th century, important American writers—such as Rose Wilder Lane, H. L. Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, Isabel Paterson, Leonard Read (the founder of Foundation for Economic Education) and the European immigrants Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand—carried on the intellectual libertarian tradition. In fiction, one can cite the work of the science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein, whose writing carried libertarian underpinnings.
As of the mid-20th century, no word was used to describe the ideological outlook of this group of thinkers. Most of them would have described themselves as "liberals" before the New Deal, but by the mid-1930s that word had been widely used to mean the opposite of "classical liberal". The term "liberal" had ceased to refer to the support of individual rights and minimal government and instead came to denote left-wing ideas that would be seen elsewhere as socialist or democratic socialism. American advocates of freedom bemoaned the loss of the word and cast about for others to replace it. The word "conservative" (later associated with libertarianism either through fiscal conservatism or through fusionism) had yet to emerge as Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind was not published until 1953 and this work hardly mentioned economics at all.
In August 1953, Max Eastman proposed the terms "New Liberalism" and "liberal conservative" which were not eventually accepted.
In May 1955, writer Dean Russell (1915–1998), a colleague of Leonard Read and a classic liberal himself, proposed a solution: "Many of us call ourselves 'liberals.' And it is true that the word 'liberal' once described persons who respected the individual and feared the use of mass compulsions. But the leftists have now corrupted that once-proud term to identify themselves and their program of more government ownership of property and more controls over persons. As a result, those of us who believe in freedom must explain that when we call ourselves liberals, we mean liberals in the uncorrupted classical sense. At best, this is awkward and subject to misunderstanding. Here is a suggestion: Let those of us who love liberty trade-mark and reserve for our own use the good and honorable word 'libertarian'".
Subsequently, a growing number of Americans with classical liberal beliefs in the United States began to describe themselves as "libertarian". The person most responsible for popularizing the term "libertarian" was Murray Rothbard, who started publishing libertarian works in the 1960s. Before the 1950s, H. L. Mencken and Albert Jay Nock had been the first prominent figures in the United States to privately call themselves "libertarians". However, their non-public use of the term went largely unnoticed and the term lay dormant on the American scene for the following few decades.
Academics as well as proponents of the free market perspectives note that free-market libertarianism has spread beyond the United States since the 1970s via think tanks and political parties and that libertarianism is increasingly viewed worldwide as a free market position. However, libertarian socialist intellectuals Noam Chomsky, Colin Ward and others argue that the term "libertarianism" is considered a synonym for social anarchism by the international community and that the United States is unique in widely associating it with free-market ideology. The use of the word "libertarian" to describe a left-wing position has been traced to the French cognate, libertaire, coined in a letter French libertarian communist Joseph Déjacque wrote to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1857.
Arizona United States Senator Barry Goldwater's libertarian-oriented challenge to authority had a major impact on the libertarian movement through his book The Conscience of a Conservative and his run for President in 1964. Goldwater's speech writer, Karl Hess, became a leading libertarian writer and activist.
The Vietnam War split the uneasy alliance between growing numbers of self-identified libertarians, anarchist libertarians and more traditional conservatives who believed in limiting liberty to uphold moral virtues. Libertarians opposed to the war joined the draft resistance and peace movements and organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society. They began founding their own publications, like Murray Rothbard's The Libertarian Forum and organizations like the Radical Libertarian Alliance.
The split was aggravated at the 1969 Young Americans for Freedom convention when more than 300 libertarians coordinated to take control of the organization from conservatives. The burning of a draft card in protest to a conservative proposal against draft resistance sparked physical confrontations among convention attendees, a walkout by a large number of libertarians, the creation of libertarian organizations like the Society for Individual Liberty, and efforts to recruit potential libertarians from conservative organizations. The split was finalized in 1971 when conservative leader William F. Buckley Jr. in a 1971 New York Times article attempted to divorce libertarianism from the freedom movement. He wrote: "The ideological licentiousness that rages through America today makes anarchy attractive to the simple-minded. Even to the ingeniously simple-minded".
In 1971, David Nolan and a few friends formed the Libertarian Party. Attracting former Democrats, Republicans and independents, it has run a presidential candidate every election year since 1972. Over the years, dozens of libertarian political parties have been formed worldwide. Educational organizations like the Center for Libertarian Studies and the Cato Institute were formed in the 1970s, and others have been created since then.
Philosophical libertarianism gained a significant measure of recognition in academia with the publication of Harvard University professor Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia in 1974. The book won a National Book Award in 1975. According to libertarian essayist Roy Childs, "Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia single-handedly established the legitimacy of libertarianism as a political theory in the world of academia".
Libertarian groups have been successful in the 21st century in advocating tax cuts and regulatory reform. While some argue that the American public as a whole shifted away from libertarianism following the fall of the Soviet Union, citing the success of multinational organizations such as NAFTA and the increasingly interdependent global financial system, others argue that libertarian ideas have moved so far into the mainstream that many Americans who do not identify as "libertarian" now hold libertarian views.
Texas congressman Ron Paul's 2008 and 2012 campaigns for the Republican Party presidential nomination were largely libertarian. Paul was affiliated with the libertarian-leaning Republican Liberty Caucus and founded the Campaign for Liberty, a libertarian-leaning membership and lobbying organization. His son Rand Paul is a Senator who continues the tradition, albeit more "moderately".
Current developments
Symbol of voluntarism
The 2016 Libertarian National Convention which saw Gary Johnson and Bill Weld nominated as the 2016 presidential ticket for the Libertarian Party resulted in the most successful result for a third-party presidential candidacy since 1996 and the best in the Libertarian Party's history by vote number. Johnson received 3% of the popular vote, amounting to more than 4.3 million votes. Johnson has expressed a desire to win at least 5% of the vote so that the Libertarian Party candidates could get equal ballot access and federal funding, thus subsequently ending the two-party system.
As was true historically, there are far more libertarians in the United States than those who belong to the party touting that name. In the United States, libertarians may emphasize economic and constitutional rather than religious and personal policies, or personal and international rather than economic policies, such as the Tea Party movement (founded in 2009), which has become a major outlet for Libertarian Republican ideas, especially rigorous adherence to the Constitution, lower taxes and an opposition to a growing role for the federal government in health care. However, polls show that many people who identify as Tea Party members do not hold traditional libertarian views on most social issues and tend to poll similarly to socially conservative Republicans. Eventually during the 2016 presidential election, many Tea Party members abandoned more libertarian-leaning views in favor of Donald Trump and his right-wing populism. Additionally, the Tea Party was considered to be a key force in Republicans reclaiming control of the House of Representatives in 2010.
Polls (circa 2006) find that the views and voting habits of between 10 and 20 percent (and increasing) of voting age Americans may be classified as "fiscally conservative and socially liberal, or libertarian". This is based on pollsters and researchers defining libertarian views as fiscally conservative and culturally liberal (based on the common United States meanings of the terms) and against government intervention in economic affairs and for expansion of personal freedoms. Through 20 polls on this topic spanning 13 years, Gallup found that voters who are libertarian on the political spectrum ranged from 17–23% of the electorate.
Libertarians, therefore, make up a larger portion of the electorate than the much-discussed "soccer moms" and "NASCAR dads", but this is not widely recognized as most of these vote for Republican and Democratic (not Libertarian) Party candidates, leading some libertarians to believe that dividing people's political leanings into "conservative", "liberal" and "confused" is not valid.
Organizations
Well-known libertarian organizations include the Center for Libertarian Studies, the Cato Institute, the Foundation for Economic Education, the Reason Foundation, Liberty International and the Mises Institute. The Libertarian Party is the world's first such party.The Free State Project, an activist movement formed in 2001, is working to bring libertarians to the state of New Hampshire to protect and advance liberty. As of July 2018, the project website shows that 23,778 people have pledged to move within 5 years and 4,352 people identify as Free Staters in New Hampshire. Less successful similar projects include the Free West Alliance and Free State Wyoming.
Mises Institute
The Mises Institute is a tax-exempt educative organization located in Auburn, Alabama, United States. It is named after Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises (1881–1973). Its website states that it exists to promote "teaching and research in the Austrian school of economics, and individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard."The Mises Institute was founded in 1982 by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., Burton Blumert and Murray Rothbard, following a split between the Cato Institute and Rothbard, who had been one of the founders of the Cato Institute. Additional backing for the founding of the Institute came from Mises's wife, Margit von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, Lawrence Fertig, and Nobel Economics Laureate Friedrich Hayek. Through its publications, the Institute promotes libertarian and anarcho-capitalist political theories and a form of heterodox economics known as praxeology ("the logic of action").
Cato Institute
Cato Institute building in Washington, D.C.
The Cato Institute is a libertarian think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C. It was founded as the Charles Koch Foundation in 1974 by Ed Crane, Murray Rothbard and Charles Koch, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of the conglomerate Koch Industries. In July 1976, the name was changed to the Cato Institute. Cato was established to have a focus on public advocacy, media exposure and societal influence. According to the 2014 Global Go To Think Tank Index Report (Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program, University of Pennsylvania), Cato is number 16 in the "Top Think Tanks Worldwide" and number 8 in the "Top Think Tanks in the United States". Cato also topped the 2014 list of the budget-adjusted ranking of international development think tanks.
Center for Libertarian Studies
The Center for Libertarian Studies (CLS) was a libertarian and anarcho-capitalist oriented educational organization founded in 1976 by Murray Rothbard and Burton Blumert, which grew out of the Libertarian Scholars Conferences. It published the Journal of Libertarian Studies from 1977 to 2000 (now published by the Mises Institute), a newsletter (In Pursuit of Liberty), several monographs and sponsors conferences, seminars, and symposia. Originally headquartered in New York, it later moved to Burlingame, California. Until 2007, it supported LewRockwell.com, web publication of CLS vice president Lew Rockwell. It had also previously supported Antiwar.com.Leaders
- Politicians
